Excerpt: Economies [merged]

[Andor]

Try buying a wedding ring (or any other jewelry) and then selling it. Anyone who has ever done this will recognize immediately that when you try to sell a used luxury good (as an individual without a store-front or clientelle), you are lucky to get 1/5 of the value. Now make the ring a rare, fancy ring and try to sell it to a dealer. You will get even less of its supposed value.

If it's a rare fancy piece of luxury jewlery you don't go to a dealer. You go to Christie's or Sotheby's and get full market price and the Auction house takes a 12-25% premium that gets paid by the buyer on top of what he's paying to you. Both Christie's and Sotheby's opened in about the 1770s btw, so this isn't exactly a new idea, nor is it dependant on modern telecommunications. Heck that's before the age of rail.

 

[Kraydak]

Try buying a wedding ring (or any other jewelry) and then selling it. Anyone who has ever done this will recognize immediately that when you try to sell a used luxury good (as an individual without a store-front or clientelle), you are lucky to get 1/5 of the value. Now make the ring a rare, fancy ring and try to sell it to a dealer. You will get even less of its supposed value.

A decent fraction of the "value" of the ring is tied up in the amount you paid for it: conspicuous consumption. Adventurer's magic items are not luxury items. They are tools.

+1 sword=tool, +1 sword with an astral diamond in the hilt=luxury item
basic sedan=tool, Ferrari=luxury item

Remember, expensive does not imply luxury. Even basic cars are expensive. So is housing. So are medications (in the US at least). A computer cluster is expensive, but is still a tool for a numerical simulator.

 

[drjones]

If it's a rare fancy piece of luxury jewlery you don't go to a dealer. You go to Christie's or Sotheby's and get full market price and the Auction house takes a 12-25% premium that gets paid by the buyer on top of what he's paying to you. Both Christie's and Sotheby's opened in about the 1770s btw, so this isn't exactly a new idea, nor is it dependant on modern telecommunications. Heck that's before the age of rail.

And how long did it take you to get your newly plundered south American antiquity to Sotheby's in 1770? And how much did it cost to make that happen?

No reason your players cannot embark on such a monumental voyage for some gold but a quick glance at the rule books will show then that if they instead spent a week adventuring and leveled up a bit they would be more wealthy than if they went to hell and back to sell some piece of junk for the absolute best price they can get.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

If it's a rare fancy piece of luxury jewlery you don't go to a dealer. You go to Christie's or Sotheby's and get full market price and the Auction house takes a 12-25% premium that gets paid by the buyer on top of what he's paying to you. Both Christie's and Sotheby's opened in about the 1770s btw, so this isn't exactly a new idea, nor is it dependant on modern telecommunications. Heck that's before the age of rail.

But who was able to make deals with them then? Nobles? Average people? People of questionable heritage or low-class jobs with no connections to anyone with a more respectable lineage or standing?

 

[gizmo33]

But who was able to make deals with them then? Nobles? Average people? People of questionable heritage or low-class jobs with no connections to anyone with a more respectable lineage or standing?

The 1:5 rule in 4E is unconditional. There's no discussion of what role social standing or any of that plays. The adventurers, who often perform tasks for nobles in many people's campaign worlds, could certainly get the grateful noble to barter on their behalf. And many PCs in many campaigns ARE nobles. And dragon slaying is a "low-class job"?

All of these assumptions IMO are unwarranted - actual Medieval history is a litany of exceptions to your basic premise here. In fact, the ENTIRE MERCHANT CLASS ITSELF in Medieval history goes against the stated social theory of "farmer/warrior/priest". Compare/constrast your statements about "respectable lineage/standing" to the conditions facing a typical Jewish merchant in Medieval Europe. Money talks and BS walks, and 10,000 gp of magic goods is a heck of a lot of money. My assertion is that waving a chance at 1,000 gp of profit at a merchant is not going to make him think about blowing it for a chance to screw over the PCs because the PC can just take his business elsewhere. It's only because you're not dealing with a society of merchants, but with a single DM with his fiat and agenda, that any of this is plausible.

 

[JohnSnow]

If it's a rare fancy piece of luxury jewlery you don't go to a dealer. You go to Christie's or Sotheby's and get full market price and the Auction house takes a 12-25% premium that gets paid by the buyer on top of what he's paying to you. Both Christie's and Sotheby's opened in about the 1770s btw, so this isn't exactly a new idea, nor is it dependant on modern telecommunications. Heck that's before the age of rail.

You're also assuming that Christie's and Sotheby's charged the same for their service then as they do now. And, while that's possible, I certainly wouldn't take it as gospel without research.

And, as has been pointed out, getting your item to them for auction is, in that timeframe, an adventure in and of itself. It's not like you could ship it UPS in 1770. You'd either take it there yourself or use a private, respectable (and very well-paid!) courier.

Not to mention that 1770 is pretty solidly past most of the historical models most of us use for D&D games. Although an interesting game could no doubt be set in that period, it would involve changing the social assumptions of the assumed D&D setting a LOT.

Instead of the age of Englightenment, think of Elizabethan England. Your adventurers are the equivalent of Francis Drake and his ilk. Your magic sword is like a captured merchant vessel. Who do they sell something like that to? The only people who can afford it are some nobles, the Queen and the richest merchanting guilds. If they're not willing to pay your price, you can either a) take the price they do offer - no doubt a pittance of full value, or b) hold on to your thing until someone offers you a better price.

In period, both were common. However, the difference is that a pirate like Drake actually has a use for two ships. How much use does your fighter actually have for a backup magic sword?

I imagine giving them as gifts to people you're trying to curry favor with or selling them at a steep discount (or even selling at a steep discount in an attempt to curry favor) are all a lot more common than getting full price.

 

[pawsplay]

But who was able to make deals with them then? Nobles? Average people? People of questionable heritage or low-class jobs with no connections to anyone with a more respectable lineage or standing?

You mean like this guy?

 

[pawsplay]

You're also assuming that Christie's and Sotheby's charged the same for their service then as they do now. And, while that's possible, I certainly wouldn't take it as gospel without research.

For most of European history, markups were disdained on principle (although obviously a tradesman had to make a living) and "easy financing" was called usury and illegal.

 

[gizmo33]

Your magic sword is like a captured merchant vessel.

You mean every fighter of 3rd level and above would have a captured merchant vessel? I don't think the 1:5 rule is confined to just items worth as much as a ship (in fact, it's not if you look at the published table). Given the amount of magic goodies possessed by a typical NPC, based on level and demographics and such, magic items are fairly common and I think the merchant vessel analogy doesn't seem appropriate to me. The market for a +1 sword IMO is far more extensive than just the queen and the richest merchant guilds.

And let's say it's not. Then the next point of weirdness for me is that all of the arguments for a lack of sellers are used *against the PCs*. Wouldn't the supposed difficulties of selling a 100,000 gp apply to NPC merchants as well? And in this case, why aren't rich PCs able to pick up expensive magic items cheaply, so as to spare all these poor merchants the misfortune of owning 100,000 gp items?

 

[Ximenes088]

This makes no sense to me. I'm not sure what you mean but my calculations made no assumptions about finding a buyer for an item for free.

I mean that if you say a 50% profit is good for a magic item merchant, and thus you should get 5,000 gold for selling a 10K-creation-cost sword, then you're assuming that the merchant is dead certain he can sell that sword for 10K without paying anything out of pocket. Once you subtract luxury taxes, bribes, security, and the risk premium, the merchant would've been better off spending 5,000 gold on mining picks.

Again - I know a lot of people on this board fancy themselves as historians to some degree - so feel free to support these assertions with an actual analogy.
...
This makes an (IMO unwarranted) assumption that the merchant in question has steady access to trading goods for the same outlay. I also think that the transportation/storage/etc. costs of 8,000 gp worth of grain would far exceed that of a 10,000 gp magic item. And I realize that you could be sitting on a mountain of statistical information and actual facts upon which your basing your guidelines for an "incompetent merchant", but I can't tell.

As you request, a brief extract from Charles D'Avenant's "An Essay on the East-India Trade", 1697.

"I shall therefore only give one instance, and that is pepper, by which some judgment may be made of all the other commodities. Pepper 5000 tuns at 2 d. per lb as it may cost the Dutch in India, amounts to 74,666l. 13 s. 4 d. Add to this 3 d. per lb for freight into Holland, then it costs 5 d. per lb which amounts to 186,666. 13 s. 4 d. Ditto 500 tuns sold in Holland at 12 d. per lb the profit being 7 d. per lb will amount to 261,333. 6 s. 8 d. But this commodity is grown so necessary, and has so obtained, and is of such general use, that it may be sold in Holland at 6 s. per lb which is less than any of the other spices, as cheap in India as pepper. Then 5000 tuns sold in Holland at 6 s. per lb the profit bing 5 s. 7 d. per lb will amount to 2,498,836. 13 s. 4 d."

The profit on one pound of pepper after transportation? About fourteen and a half times what it cost to bring it. But spices are notoriously high-profit goods. What of ordinary trade in non-luxuries? D'Avenant's pamphlet is useful, for it is against the inclusion of a sumptuary law that would prohibit the export of many luxury goods to India, and thus cut exports in half. He points out,

"If this trade be so restrained, by prohibitions, as that there can be sent to India, not above per ann. 200,000 l. The national profit from thence arising cannot reasonably exceed 600,000 l. The companies charge and expence, to support and carry on their affairs abroad, may be modestly computed at per ann. 100,000 l. Which sum will be a great weight upon per ann. 600,000 l. But will fall lightly upon per ann. 1,200,000 l."

...thus making clear that he expects 3:1 profit on the most banal sundries and ordinaries, completely ignoring high-profit luxury trades. But in a larger sense, it's certainly true that the grain merchant wasn't usually making 3:1 on wheat- albeit in the fourteenth century, English grain prices varied by up to a factor of four- but PCs don't sell magic swords to commodity brokers. They sell them to gentleman adventurers like those of the East India Company.